Born on April 10

401

Theodosius II
Eastern Roman Emperor from 408 to 450.
He is mostly known for promulgating the Theodosian law code, and for the construction of the Theodosian Walls of Constantinople. He also presided over the outbreak of two great christological controversies, Nestorianism and Eutychianism

943

Landulf I of Benevento
a Lombard nobleman and the Prince of Benevento and of Capua from 12 January 901, when his father, Atenulf I, prince of Capua and conqueror of Benevento, associated his with him in power.

1018

Nizam al-Mulk
a Persian scholar and vizier of the Seljuq Empire.
He held near absolute power for 20 years after the assassination of Alp Arslan in 1072

1055

Conrad II Duke of Bavaria
the duke of Bavaria from 1054 to 1055.
He was the second son of the Emperor Henry III and his second wife, Agnes of Poitou. He was briefly appointed duke of Bavaria, which had been held by his elder brother Henry. He died soon after and was replaced by Henry

1151

Igor Svyatoslavich
a Rus’ prince.
His baptismal name was Yury. Igor was prince of Putivl , of Novgorod-Seversk , and of Chernigov

1270

Haakon V of Norway
king of Norway from 1299 until 1319.

1480

Philibert II Duke of Savoy
the Duke of Savoy from 1497 until his death.

1487

William I Count of Nassau-Dillenburg
a count of Nassau-Dillenburg from the House of Nassau.
He was not wealthy; his nickname the Rich refers to him having many children

1502

Otto Henry Elector Palatine
Count Palatine of Palatinate-Neuburg from 1505 to 1559 and prince elector of the Palatinate from 1556 to 1559.
He was a son of Rupert, Count Palatine, third son of Philip, Elector Palatine; and of Elizabeth of Bavaria-Landshut, daughter of George of Bavaria

1512

James V of Scotland
King of Scots from 9 September 1513 until his death, which followed the Scottish defeat at the Battle of Solway Moss.
His only surviving legitimate child, Mary, succeeded him to the throne when she was just six days old

1569

Countess Emilia of Nassau
the third and youngest daughter of William the Silent and his second wife Anna of Saxony.

1579

Augustus the Younger Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg
duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg.
In the estate division of the House of Welf of 1635, he received the Principality of Wolfenbüttel

1583

Gonzalo Ronquillo de Peñalosa
the fourth Spanish governor and captain-general of the Philippines from April 1580 until his death in 1583.
He was succeeded by his nephew, Diego Ronquillo

1583

Hugo Grotius
a jurist in the Dutch Republic.
With Francisco de Vitoria and Alberico Gentili he laid the foundations for international law, based on natural law. He was also a philosopher, theologian, Christian apologist, playwright, historiographer, poet, statesman and diplomat

1616

Trijntje Keever
alleged to be the tallest female person in recorded history, standing 9 Amsterdam feet or 2.54 metres tall at the time of her death at age seventeen.

1626

Franz Egon of Fürstenberg
the elder son of Egon VIII of Fürstenberg-Heiligenberg , who served with distinction as a Bavarian general in the Thirty Years' War.

1651

Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus
a German mathematician, physicist, physician, and philosopher.
He is considered by some to have been the inventor of European porcelain, an invention long accredited to Johann Friedrich Böttger but others claim porcelain had been made by English manufacturers at an even earlier date

1656

René Lepage de Sainte-Claire
the lord-founder of the town of Rimouski, province of Quebec, in Canada.

1704

Benjamin Heath
an English classical scholar and bibliophile.

1707

Michel Corrette
a French organist, composer and author of musical method books.

1707

John Pringle
a Scottish physician who has been called the "father of military medicine".

1713

John Whitehurst
a clockmaker and scientist, and made significant early contributions to geology.
He was an influential member of the Lunar Society

1727

Samuel Heinicke
born in Nautschutz, Germany.

1737

Sir George Staunton 1st Baronet
an employee of the East India Company and a botanist.

Georg Prochaska
a leading Czech-Austrian anatomist, ophthalmologist, physiologist, writer and university professor.
He wrote the first genuine textbook on physiology and created the concept of nerve conduction among other theories. He was a staunch promoter of the modern reflex theory

1755

Samuel Hahnemann
a German physician, best known for creating a system of alternative medicine called homeopathy.

1760

White Watson
an early English geologist, sculptor, stonemason and carver, marble-worker and mineral dealer.
In common with many learned people of his time, he was skilled in a number of artistic and scientific areas, becoming a writer, poet, journalist, teacher, botanist and gardener as well as a geologist and mineralogist. He kept extensive diaries and sketchbooks of his observations on geology, fossils and minerals, flora and fauna, and published a small but significant and influential number of geological papers and catalogues. As an artist he was well known locally for his silhouettes, both on paper and as marble inlays

1761

Jacques-Edme Dumont
a French sculptor.

1762

Giovanni Aldini
a brother of the statesman Count Antonio Aldini and nephew of Luigi Galvani, whose treaties on muscular electricity he edited with notes in 1791.

1766

John Leslie (physicist)
a Scottish mathematician and physicist best remembered for his research into heat.

1769

Jean Lannes
a Marshal of the Empire.
He was one of Napoleon's most daring and talented generals. Napoleon once commented on Lannes: "I found him a pygmy and left him a giant". A personal friend of the emperor, he was allowed to address him with the familiar "tu", as opposed to the formal "vous"

1778

William Hazlitt
an English writer, remembered for his humanistic essays and literary criticism, as the greatest art critic of his age, and as a drama critic, social commentator, and philosopher.
He was also a painter. He is now considered one of the great critics and essayists of the English language, placed in the company of Samuel Johnson and George Orwell. Yet his work is currently little read and mostly out of print. During his lifetime he befriended many people who are now part of the 19th-century literary canon, including Charles and Mary Lamb, Stendhal, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Wordsworth

1783

Hortense de Beauharnais
the stepdaughter of Emperor Napoleon I, being the daughter of his first wife, Joséphine de Beauharnais.
She later became the wife of the former's brother, Louis Bonaparte, King of Holland, and the mother of Napoleon III, Emperor of the French. She had also an illegitimate son, Charles Auguste Louis Joseph, duc de Morny, by her lover Charles Joseph, comte de Flahaut

1794

Matthew C. Perry
a Commodore of the U.S.
Navy and commanded a number of ships. He served in several wars, most notably in the Mexican-American War and the War of 1812. He played a leading role in the opening of Japan to the West with the Convention of Kanagawa in 1854. Perry was very concerned with the education of naval officers and helped develop an apprentice system that helped establish the curriculum at the United States Naval Academy. With the advent of the steam engine, he became a leading advocate of modernizing the U.S. Navy and came to be considered The Father of the Steam Navy in the US

1801

Julius Müller
a German Protestant theologian.

1801

Princess Mathilde of Waldeck and Pyrmont
a member of the House of Waldeck and Pyrmont and a Princess of Waldeck and Pyrmont and a member of the House of Württemberg and a Duchess of Württemberg through her marriage to Duke Eugen of Württemberg.

1802

Johann Peter Lange
a German Calvinist theologian of peasant origin.

1803

Johann Jakob Kaup
a German naturalist.
A proponent of natural philosophy, he believed in an innate mathematical order in nature and he attempted biological classifications based on the Quinarian system

1803

Adolf Heinrich von Arnim-Boitzenburg
a German statesman, and the first Prime Minister of Prussia.

1806

Juliette Drouet
a French actress.
She abandoned her career on the stage after becoming the mistress of Victor Hugo, to whom she acted as a secretary and travelling companion. Juliette accompanied Hugo in his exile to the Channel Islands, and wrote thousands of letters to him throughout her life

1806

Leonidas Polk
a Confederate general in the American Civil War who was once a planter in Maury County, Tennessee, and a second cousin of President James Polk.
He also served as bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Louisiana and was for that reason known as Sewanee's Fighting Bishop

1808

Auguste Franchomme
a French cellist and composer.
For his contributions to music, he was decorated with the Légion d'honneur in 1884

1817

Konstantin Aksakov
a Russian critic and writer, one of the earliest and most notable Slavophiles.
He wrote plays, social criticism, and histories of the ancient Russian social order. His father Sergey Aksakov was a writer, and his younger brother Ivan Aksakov was a journalist

1818

Auguste Ambroise Tardieu
a French medical doctor and the pre-eminent forensic medical scientist of the mid-19th century.

1823

Thomas Reade Rootes Cobb
an American lawyer, author, politician, and Confederate States Army officer, killed in the Battle of Fredericksburg during the American Civil War.

1827

Lew Wallace
an American lawyer, Union general in the American Civil War, governor of the New Mexico Territory, politician, diplomat, and author from Indiana.
Among his novels and biographies, Wallace is best known for his historical adventure story, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ , a bestselling novel that has been called "the most influential Christian book of the nineteenth century."

1829

Johannes Janssen
a Catholic priest and German historian born in Xanten.
After graduating from the Rektoratsschule in Xanten he was educated at the universities of Münster, Leuven, Bonn and Berlin, afterwards becoming a teacher of history in Frankfurt-am-Main

1829

William Booth
a British Methodist preacher who founded The Salvation Army and became its first General.
The Christian movement with a quasi-military structure and government founded in 1865 has spread from London, England to many parts of the world and is known for being one of the largest distributors of humanitarian aid

1833

Granville Waldegrave 3rd Baron Radstock
a British missionary and a Peer of Ireland.